 My name is Sam Vaknin and I am the author of Mellignat-Self-Love and Narcissism Revisited. The narcissist is nothing but a shell and casing a void. Uncertain of his own reality, the narcissist engages in what I call conspicuous existence, a kind of theatre of narcissistic absurd. Narcissist existence is a form of conspicuous consumption, in which the consumed commodity is narcissistic supply. The narcissist elaborately stage managers his very being. His every movement, his tone of voice, his posture, his inflection, his poise, his text, his subtext and context, they are all carefully orchestrated, choreographed, to yield the maximum effect and to garner the most attention. Consequently, narcissists appear to be unpleasantly deliberate, they are somehow wrong, like automata, gun or eye or a robot of kilter. Narcissists are either too human or too inhuman, too modest, too hotty, too loving, too cold, too empathic, too stony, too industrious, too casual, too enthusiastic, too indifferent, too courteous, too abrasive, but it's always too much of something. Narcissists are excess and bullied, they act their part and their acting shows, their thespian skills notwithstanding, the effort emanates and exudes through the seams of their existence, their show invariably unravels the seams under the slightest stress. Their enthusiasm is always manic, their emotional expression unnatural, their body language defies their own statements, their statements belie their intentions, their intentions are focused on one and only one thing, a drug securing narcissistic supply from other people. The narcissist offers, composes his life, he scripts his life, to him time is the medium upon which he, the narcissist, records the narrative of his recherche biography. The narcissist is therefore always calculated as though listening to an inner voice to a kind of movie director or a choreographer of his unfolding, significant, cosmically significant history. The narcissist pitches to it, his motion stunted, his emotional pallet, a mockery of true countenances. But the narcissist's constant invention of his self is not limited to outward appearances. The narcissist does nothing and says nothing, even it doesn't even think anything, he thinks nothing, without first having computed the quantity of narcissistic supply that his actions, utterances or thoughts may yield. The visible narcissist is the tip of a gigantic, submerged iceberg of seething reckoning, endless number of calculations. The narcissist is like these famous supercomputers. He is incessantly engaged in energy draining gorging of other people and their possible reactions to him. The narcissist constantly estimates, evaluates, counts, weighs, measures, determines, enumerates, compares, despairs, reawakens, restarts, reboots and extracts. Extracts what? The narcissist takes supply. His fatigued brain is bathed with the drowning noise of stratagems and fears, rage and envy, anxiety and relief, addiction, rebellion, mediation, meditation and premeditation. The narcissist is a machine, which never rests, not even in his dreams, and it has one purpose only, securing and maximizing narcissistic supply. Small wonder that the narcissist is tired, exhausted. His exhaustion is all-pervasive and all-consuming. His mental energy depleted. The narcissist can hardly empathize with others. He cannot flout, he cannot experience emotions. He is too zombified, too tired. Conspicuous existence malignantly replaces real existence. Period and vivilent forms of life are supplanted by the single obsession compulsion of I must be seen, I must be observed, I must be reflected, of being by proxy through the gaze of others. The narcissist scissors to exist when he is not in company. He is being fades when he is not discerned, when he is not noticed. When he is ignored, he is dead, yet he is unable to return the favor. He is a captive, oblivious to everything but his preoccupation. Empty from within, devoured by his urge, the narcissist blindly stumbles from one relationship to another, from one warm body to the next, forever in search of that elusive creature himself.